


Stanzas in 3/16th Time

by omphale23



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Multi, Multiple Universe
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-14
Updated: 2010-03-14
Packaged: 2017-10-07 23:57:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,225
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/70579
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omphale23/pseuds/omphale23
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An entry for the amnesty challenge, <a href="http://community.livejournal.com/ds_snippets/profile"><img/></a><a href="http://community.livejournal.com/ds_snippets/"><b>ds_snippets</b></a></p>
            </blockquote>





	Stanzas in 3/16th Time

**Author's Note:**

> This is a bit hard to describe. It holds three levels of narrative. And sixteen fandoms. Twenty-seven characters. And it was really a bit of a nightmare, and put the beta efforts that [](http://slidellra.livejournal.com/profile)[**slidellra**](http://slidellra.livejournal.com/) made above-and-beyond-the-call. Especially since she's only familiar with 2/3 of the fandoms.

**Fandoms, Pairing, and Length:** Many pairings, many fandoms, three lengths.

Doctor Who (100), The West Wing (125), La Femme Nikita (125), Numb3rs (125), Buried on Sunday (100), due South (125), RENT (125), Slings &amp; Arrows (150), Chasing Rainbows (150), Psych (125), Torchwood (150), The Crow (100), Twitch City (125), Hard Core Logo (150), Battlestar Galactica (125), Men With Guns (125); Total word count: 2025

***

**a new hairstyle**   
_Doctor Who_

There was no surprise, finding himself burned clean and left without pretense. Waking up at all—now that had been unexpected. That had been something new. But once he'd grown accustomed to existence itself, the trappings were a bit of poetic justice. The universe laughing at him.

The only one left, and he was clothed in austerity. Gone was the foppish hair, gone was the velvet and lace. Gone was a planet, a people, a home.

In its place was battered leather and shadowed eyes. To replace of the hum of belonging came new silence.

Given history, he preferred this.

 

**the first time**   
_The West Wing_

It was over when they met. He saw her sitting in his office and that was it, she was all he wanted. He kept moving, kept trying to ignore it, kept working so hard and so fast and so late that his eyes crossed sometimes.

After nights like that, too many of them, he woke with her standing over the desk, shaking her head and offering a clean shirt and something that was never coffee. He learned to prefer those mornings. It was an easy lesson, waking up to her smile.

But almost a decade later, running down a hallway and wishing himself miles away, he knew it was the first meeting that decided everything. All the moments after that were no more than echoes.

 

**bleed**   
_La Femme Nikita_

He no longer hurt. After the first sharp shock of another cut, another scar, another symbol of something he would never be, the pain faded and left him alone.

He began wearing black because the stains didn't show. They vanished into wool and leather. They faded into nothing. They left him able to lie about whether he'd been marked at all.

The clothing was a shield. It was also a weapon, and that was as it should be.

She wore white, that first meeting, and all he could think of was how the blood would bloom, set, and mark her in ways that he no longer felt possible. How death would highlight the difference between living and existing.

How she would bleed and feel it.

 

**Your personal conviction's fierce  
It's been in your family for years**   
_Numb3rs_

Charlie was a problem. Charlie didn't want to be an adult. Charlie didn't know what it felt like, being disappointed and overlooked and taken as less than he was. Charlie never longed to fit, because he didn't know how to be anyone other than himself. He wanted to be left alone.

Charlie was still a little boy in so many ways, and she didn't need someone else to care for. So why, if he was a child—for all his brilliance—was she still here? Why had she chosen this over a life of her own? What fatal flaw dictated this result?

What formula predicted that he would always get what he needed, every time, even if it took more than she had to give?

 

**restrained**   
_Buried on Sunday_

The collar wasn't for his congregation. They didn't need it, knew who he was and saw him as more than the ratty sweater. They trusted him. They always saw what they needed to see.

It wasn't for the tourists. Once the shock value wore off, it wasn't even that much fun.

He wasn't sure why he wore it. It was a reminder, a symbol, that someone was watching him. Even if he didn't always believe the subtle weight kept him in line. Kept him responsible. Kept him still here, on the island, long after he would have tried to leave.

 

**Because I'm the blue eyed son of hurricane  
I'll twirl you so sweetly so around**   
_due South_

This was much like living in the center of a storm. There were tiny moments of quiet, small respites from the weight of life and the demands of partners and country and justice.

But these moments were few, flitted away like moths when he tried to hold them. In their place was Ray, a strangely fluid anchor. A spinning pole from which to draw both comfort and direction. A lodestar.

A planet, moving through space, pulling him to orbit in the cold and dark.

Within view, never touching. Tied together by circumstance and choice. Tied and held and yet Fraser found himself desperate, sometimes, to throw himself into the hurricane.

Perhaps he was ready to beg Ray to jump, even if he—they—might drown.

 

**up against the wall**   
_RENT_

Usually he would shoot a scene from the edge of the room. A wall was steady. It kept things in perspective. Held it all together even when he was falling apart. Mocked and comforted in equal measures.

He needed his life to mean something, even when it didn't.

He watched Maureen walk away, spit anger at Rodger, and heard Angel's last gasps. Stood there and took it all in. Recorded everything, wrote it all down in film and memory. He never cried, not once. Not after the first time. Never.

And now he could lean back and feel the weight of bricks and mortar. Feel that something would survive this.

Something more solid that friendship and family. It kept him warm. It was his anchor.

 

**photo**   
_Slings &amp; Arrows_

Oliver hated that image. It mocked him. That damn photo reminded him that, whatever the losses he ignored, Geoffrey was the one that would haunt him.

Geoffrey was the reason that Ellen never grew up, never looked him in the eye.

Geoffrey was the boy who held them together and fell into the world and ran away. Oliver was the one left behind, and it hurt.

It hurt as much as seeing him, raving or silent or muttering "a glooming peace this morning with it brings." It hurt, and Oliver held onto that pain, kept it as one thing that wouldn't break and fall apart.

He kept the photo on the wall as he stared into space and remembered what he had and drove away. He kept it, and treasured it, and hated it. He talked to it sometimes, when nobody was listening.

Maybe that made him mad as well.

 

**"Passionate erotic love tends to be an excess of friendship."**   
_Chasing Rainbows_

He hated Aristotle. Greeks and Romans. More dead men with nothing to give in a new world. What did they know about where he lived? How could they know the problems he faced? When did they talk about the pain of loss and the threat of losing? What good were they when everyone depended on him to be indestructible?

Tennis and cravats and bad plays about silly people. He shouldn't have time for any of it.

Only. Only Chris looked at him, with sweat dripping and that lost space behind his eyes.

When they pulled on gloves, afraid of bare hands. When he swung and connected and they both knew it wasn't about pain. When he fell and someone was there to catch him. When he was there to hold things together. When he would have collapsed under the weights on his shoulders.

Then, maybe, Aristotle had something to say.

 

**unseen**   
_Psych_

He didn't believe in the unseen. No self-respecting detective would. If the world wasn't made of things he could see and touch and taste, then there was always the chance that it was impossible to solve. There wasn't time for things that didn't exist. Not in the real world.

Spencer was a problem. Spencer kept him up at night, thinking about all the things he didn't know. Spencer was both more and less than he appeared, and Lassiter wondered if that was the reason he worked so hard to ignore all the options that Spencer opened without thinking. He refused to listen to the voices that said maybe Spencer had a point.

Voices that said you can't see friendship, can't touch need, can't taste love.

 

**album**   
_Torchwood_

There were no pictures. Not even a copy of that day in Cardiff, one of the last times where they were all happy. He could see them, scaring the natives and being a little too loud, a little too manic, a little too sure of themselves. A little too real.

He didn't need the visual record. He had an album in his head, a slideshow of moments, a collection of the things he thought he'd found and then lost in the end. He had the two of them, making space for three and never asking for less than everything. He could see it all, long before any of it existed. Could play it back, turn the pages and find them waiting.

It gave him something to look for, something to imagine, something to keep him company in the long nights when sleep didn't come and he still remembered the regrets.

 

**angel(s)**   
_The Crow_

He was never an angel. Never pretended and never claimed truth. He was avenging, but chose no morality to lean upon. Older than heaven, the urge to redeem death by taking life.

He chose colors of death and loss, regrets and longing. Clothed himself in anger and fear. He fell to earth, and in falling, learned what it was to fly.

He was no more, he was no less, than what remained of a furious love. Judgment from somewhere other than on high. A reminder that the universe was jealous and ruthless.

That it held moments of grace and justice.

 

**When are you thinking of disappearing?  
When are you falling off the map?  
When the unknown that you're fearing's in the clearing?  
When your world's gone flat?**   
_Twitch City_

People mostly rotated in and out of his life. They didn't stay (well, other than Nathan, and even he left after a while) and they sometimes came back (Newbie was a persistent fucker) and he tried not to get attached.

It wasn't hard, because people, real people, weren't nearly as interesting as television people. They were kind of boring, actually. No secrets to learn, no hidden talents (Hope could tap dance, but that wasn't much) and it was good that life couldn't be taped and played back. Television was real. Worth thinking about.

He watched the people but he wasn't sure. Whether anyone would miss him. Whether he was already gone. Whether Hope was the only one holding him to reality.

He kept changing channels.

 

**dancing**   
_Hard Core Logo_

Punks don't fucking dance. Billy didn't dance, not ever. Even if he had music and talent, without a purpose his hands shook and twisted and gave him away.

They wouldn't settle, lost any grace he pretended to feel on a stage. He never knew what to do with his fucking hands when they weren't holding a drink, a guitar, something. Someone.

Joe, though. Joe danced. Joe thundered and screamed and didn't care what he was or if it made sense. He stomped through life, angry and loud, and he spun through shows, bouncing from John to Billy to the rest of the room.

Joe danced behind Billy's eyelids in the middle of the night. He spit and he sang and he laughed. He called Billy names that sounded like insults but somehow weren't.

Billy wasn't sure what it meant, wasn't sure if he liked it. That, at least, was familiar.

 

**If I ask you a question  
Are you going to lie to me?  
Is that your question?  
Because that one is easy**   
_Battlestar Galactica_

It would be better if it didn't talk. It was talking that twisted her up, made things seem true that weren't. It was the voice that echoed and answered questions she never asked. As long as he didn't talk, everything was about survival.

Everything else was bearable. She didn't want safe. She didn't want perfect. She just wanted quiet, sometimes. Freedom, always.

But he never shut up, and the longer it went the harder it was to remember that she hated him, hated them all, hated being here and trapped. Some mornings she could almost believe this was normal. Like this strange life was familiar, and she was the one with the problem.

Those were the days she thought of new ways to kill him.

 

**storytelling**   
_Men With Guns_

The scent of coins hits him. This is an ending. Now is all they needed.

This isn't his fight anymore, if it ever was.

He couldn't have seen anything past now, not even when it was new and he was caught up in being part of here and soon and there and never.

The promise of excitement and change. The three of them moving always and faster and more than he could alone.

There was nothing left, no story to tell. It made the action easier.

He didn't need to think about what came after. This is the last time.

Planning was never one of his strengths. He is all movement, the tip of the neck, the warmth of the barrel, the moment of decision.


End file.
